Harvard Business School has taken first place for the sixth time in seven years in the new Poets&Quants ranking of the best MBA programs in the U.S. Stanford is in second place, Chicago Booth is in third, and Northwestern Kellogg and UPenn’s Wharton School are tied for fourth. This is also the sixth out of…

Our guest today is Peter Johnson, Assistant Dean of the Full-Time MBA Program and Admissions at Haas School of Business. He has been on the admissions team almost continually at Haas since 2004, becoming the director in 2006 and the Assistant Dean of Admissions in 2012. Welcome, Peter! Can you give us an overview of the…

The supplemental information that Haas requests is unchanged. Essay 2 and 3 are somewhat different from last year’s questions. There is a new option replacing what was the second option for question #2. #3 is a clarification of last year’s #3. #1 is unchanged. Haas also is a little less encouraging in terms of using the…

How did your target MBA programs fare this year? Let’s take a look: Top 10 MBA Programs: Here are some observations and highlights (some from Poets & Quants): • This is the first year in seven years that Stanford hasn’t been in the top spot. The school is now tied for second place with Chicago Booth…

B-school’s not cheap. We all know that. And we all know that staying in-state and attending a public university close to home can save you money…but how much? Should you choose your MBA program based on price? Should you stay in-state to save money? Those are questions that depend on you, the schools available in…

Here are some highlights from the Financial Times‘ top 20 global MBA programs (with a few points on women in business school): • This is the first time that a one-year MBA program (INSEAD) has taken the #1 spot. The other 4 schools in the top 5 remain the same as last year, each pushed…

Staying local is the general trend for budget-conscious MBA students, and there’s a good reason for this. According to the stats over at U.S. News, out-of-state students could pay close to $60,000 a year. Here are a few highlights from the research: • Michigan Ross charged the out-of-state students $59,778 in tuition fees (about $5,000…

Let’s see how our favorite global MBA programs fared in the 2015 Financial Times rankings. (See the full chart on the FT site here.) Last year, there were some very dramatic leaps and falls. This year there are fewer. Here are some highlights: • UC Berkeley Haas is the only newcomer to the top 10,…

The much anticipated Poets & Quants rankings is out! Let’s see how P&Q rates the top schools: • Harvard’s on top. As usual. Here’s the P&Q position on this: “No rival beats Harvard in the formidable resources it brings to the game: more superstar professors than any other school, the diversity of its course offerings,…

UC Berkeley Haas announced the launch of a new entrepreneurship program this week that will provide more seed funding and lending opportunities for startups run by Haas students. Plans for the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program (BHEP) in the next year include: • Providing early-stage startups and mentorship programs with $100,000 of funding (available twice a year to…

Out with the old, in with the new. Let’s take a look at Bloomberg’s 2015 top 20 U.S. MBA programs: • There wasn’t a single overlap between this year’s rankings and last year’s. And there was some very significant shuffling around. These dramatic ups and downs, explains John A. Byrne, rankings expert from Poets &…

The supplemental information that Haas requests is almost unchanged. The essays are different from last years. For #1 they have an essay question very similar to one from two years ago. And for #2, they give you a choice of prompts. My tips are in blue below. Essays: At Berkeley-Haas, we seek candidates from a broad…

Women now make up 60% of university graduates, but most business schools have lagged behind when it comes to gender balance—impacting not just women’s experience of b-school, but the composition of the workforce afterward. A new report from gender consulting firm 20-first looks at the numbers of women MBA students and faculty at top programs,…

TopMBA’s new 2014/2015 global report ranks business programs according to geographic location based on surveys completed by 5,669 actively-hiring MBA employers and 7,187 academics in the field of business and management. (See more about the methodology here.) Top 20 B-Schools in North America Some highlights: • The top 10 remained virtually the same this year…

Let’s see how full-time MBA programs in the U.S. fared this year on the BW rankings… There were some huge changes this year! Let’s take a look at some of the highlights: • Newcomers to the top 20 this year are Yale SOM, which made a huge jump from 21st place to 10th place; Maryland…

Haas’ application this year has relatively minor changes. It replaced last year’s #1, which was a somewhat artsy question about a song that expresses who you are, with a straightforward question about a transformational experience. The other significant change is that Haas provides word length guidelines that provide range, for instance 400-500 word maximum, instead of…